Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future

Today, not only is everything digital getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate, we also have the Internet. When these two revolutions - one in technology and the other in communications - joined, an explosive force was unleashed that changed the very nature of innovation. And with any change, we have seen many strategic blunders and extraordinary learning curves along the way.

Leading Change

John Kotter, the world's foremost expert on business leadership, distills 25 years of experience into Leading Change. A must-have for any organization, this visionary and very personal audiobook is at once inspiring, clear-headed, and filled with important implications for the future. Kotter identifies an eight-step process that every company must go through to achieve its goal, and shows where and how people—good people—often derail.

Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down

You believe in a good idea. You know it could make a crucial difference for you, your organization, your community. You present it, hoping for enthusiastic support. Instead, you get confounding questions, inane comments, and verbal bullets. Before you know what’s hit you, your idea is dead, shot down. It doesn’t have to be this way, say John Kotter and Lorne Whitehead. In Buy-In, they reveal how to protect good ideas and win the support needed to deliver valuable results.

The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations

Kotter and co-author Dan S. Cohen delve deeper into the subject of change to get to the heart of how change actually happens. Through compelling, real-life stories from people in the trenches, in all kinds of organizations, the authors attack the fundamental problem that underlies every major transformation: How do you go beyond simply getting your message across to truly changing people's behavior?

Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions

Our Iceberg Is Melting is a simple fable about doing well in an ever-changing world. Based on the award-winning work of Harvard's John Kotter, it is a story that has been used to help thousands of people and organizations. The fable is about a penguin colony in Antarctica. A group of beautiful emperor penguins live as they have for many years. Then one curious bird discovers a potentially devastating problem threatening their home - and pretty much no one listens to him.

Diane Dye Hansen - What Works Coaching says:"Fantastic Fable about how to create change"

That's Not How We Do It Here!: A Story About How Organizations Rise and Fall - and Can Rise Again

Once upon a time, a clan of meerkats lived in the Kalahari, a region in Southern Africa. After years of steady growth, a drought has sharply reduced the clan's resources, and deadly vulture attacks have increased. As things keep getting worse, the harmony of the clan is shattered. The executive team quarrels about possible solutions, and suggestions from frontline workers face a soul-crushing response: "That's not how we do it here!"

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Change Management

Most companies' change initiatives fail. Yours don't have to. If you listen to nothing else on change management, listen to these 10 articles (featuring "Leading Change" by John P. Kotter). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you spearhead change in your organization.

Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations

Every day we work hard to motivate ourselves, the people we live with, the people who work for and do business with us. In this way much of what we do can be defined as being motivators. From the boardroom to the living room, our role as motivators is complex, and the more we try to motivate partners and children, friends and coworkers, the clearer it becomes that the story of motivation is far more intricate and fascinating than we've assumed.

Idrees Haddad says:"Great insights into what motivates and demotivates"

The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care

Our health care system is in critical condition. The Affordable Care Act has insured more Americans than ever, yet deductibles keep rising and costs continue to climb. Now more than ever, the industry needs a shot in the arm. It needs The Innovator's Prescription, the now-classic approach to efficient, affordable health care.

The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate the Three Essential Virtues: A Leadership Fable

In The Ideal Team Player, Lencioni tells the story of Jeff Shanley, a leader desperate to save his uncle's company by restoring its cultural commitment to teamwork. Jeff must crack the code on the virtues that real team players possess and then build a culture of hiring and development around those virtues. Beyond the fable, Lencioni presents a practical framework and actionable tools for identifying, hiring, and developing ideal team players.

A Sense of Urgency Creates Great Work

How can a sense of urgency propel you and your organization to peak performance? Learn why people behave the way they do and understand how a sense of urgency can lead a team to accomplishments you never thought possible.

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

In Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit, coaching becomes a regular, informal part of your day so managers and their teams can work less hard and have more impact. Drawing on years of experience training more than 10,000 busy managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills, Bungay Stanier reveals how to unlock your peoples' potential. He unpacks seven essential coaching questions to demonstrate how - by saying less and asking more - you can develop coaching methods that produce great results.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

In this must-listen book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, students, and businesspeople - both seasoned and new - that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called "grit". Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, MacArthur "genius" Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success.

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior

A Harvard Business School student pays over $200 for a $20 bill. Washington, D.C., commuters ignore a free subway concert by a violin prodigy. A veteran airline pilot attempts to take off without control-tower clearance and collides with another plane on the runway. Why do we do the wildly irrational things we sometimes do?

Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change

Whether you're a CEO, a parent, or merely a person who wants to make a difference, you probably wish you had more influence with the people in your life. But most of us stop trying to make change happen because we believe it is too difficult, if not impossible. We learn to cope rather than learning to influence. Influencer is a thought-provoking audiobook that combines the remarkable insights of behavioral scientists and business leaders with the astonishing stories of high-powered influencers from all walks of life.

Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company

Using the ancient Inuit whale hunt as a metaphor for big sales, Whale Hunting gives you a clear nine-phase model for successfully finding, landing, and harvesting whale-sized sales accounts - the kind of sales that transform your business. Here, you’ll learn how to turn the dangerous endeavor of selling to large companies and big contracts into a strategy for continued success and growth. Stop wasting time with little accounts and start landing monster accounts.

Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works

This is A.G. Lafley’s guidebook. Shouldn’t it be yours as well?Winning CEO A.G. Lafley is now back at the helm of consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble. If you want to know the strategy he’ll use to restore P&G to its former dominance, read this book.

Pre-Suasion: Channeling Attention for Change

The author of the legendary best seller Influence, social psychologist Robert Cialdini, shines a light on effective persuasion and reveals that the secret doesn't lie in the message itself but in the key moment before that message is delivered.

Publisher's Summary

Its practitioners are unusually alert. They come to work each day determined to achieve something important, and they shed irrelevant activities to move faster and smarter.

Those with a sense of urgency are the opposite of complacent - but they are not stressed-out and anxious, generating great activity without much productivity. Instead, they move boldly toward the future - sharply on the lookout for the hazards and the opportunities that change brings.

Best-selling author and business guru John Kotter knows about urgency. "Raising urgency" is the first step in his enormously successful eight-step framework, first articulated in Leading Change. But as Kotter illustrates, increasing urgency is the toughest of the eight steps, and the one without which even the most brilliant, high-powered initiatives will sputter and die.

More importantly, as we transition to a world where change is continuous - not just episodic - he shows how urgency must become a core, sustained capability.

With vivid and powerful stories, Kotter reveals a distinctive view of the kind of urgency needed in every organization. He also highlights the insidious nature of its nemesis, complacency, in all its guises. He explains the crucial difference between constructive true urgency, and the frantic wheel-spinning that is so often mistaken for urgency. He provides key tactics for increasing urgency, as well as exposing and rooting out complacency, with chapters on:

Bringing the outside in

Behaving with urgency every day

Finding opportunity in crises

Dealing with "No-Nos" or naysayers

A Sense of Urgency is a powerful tool for anyone wanting to win in a turbulent world that will only continue to move faster.

Very dry material. Only listened to it because our plant is using the strategy. If you are looking for a book go with the 7 habits of highly effective people. Only read this book if your company has already chosen it as the platform.